LC wrote on Oct 30, 2012, 14:03:Judging from the negative Linux comments most of you folks haven't tried it in awhile or not at all. I've used Windows for the last 13-14 years and found the transition very, very easy. A lot of the distros run 'out of the box'. Download a live CD and try it out, just keep in mind it'll most likely be a little sluggish running off CD or USB stick.

Right but the problems usually begin when a user wants to install "boxed" software. Package managers and whatnot are arcane voodoo to those people, the ones who want to run office, an antivirus application and get lolcat screensavers or whatever. I guess my point is that getting booted to a user friendly desktop is only half the battle. The kind of people who just want to game on Steam aren't necessarily all power users, far from it. I play Counter-Strike and other FPS games quite a bit with public communities, I am amazed most of the people I encounter actually managed to get themselves in game. Hell, back before UPNP and other advances many couldn't.

The PC market has a deceptive amount of casual users and those people need their OS preinstalled, I'm not sure if Linux has made any traction there recently but last I heard things weren't good.

I think it's promising that a large company like Valve is willing to put their weight behind it but there is a lot that needs to be done, the lack of a unifying API like DirectX is particularly troublesome when it comes to games adoption on Linux despite the Win32 emulation advances.